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Upsetting The Balance
Upsetting The Balance: The Panzer IV brewed up, orange flame billowing and a column of thick black smoke mounting swiftly into the air. But a moment later, another rocket incinerated a German panzer. The German panzer hit the brakes to fire into that stand of bushes. Moments later, the bushes went up in flames as part of the troop carrier's funeral pyre. Jager whooped like a red Indian. One blew a hole in the ground. The other five hit German panzers. Two of the machines survived, but the other three went up in flames. A couple of crewmen managed to bail out of escape hatches; most perished. Just then a Lizard troop carrier that had lain lown opened up with a rocket and took out a panzer less than a hundred meters from Jager's. "Hit!" Jager yelled. "Hit! Got him in one, Klaus! Forward!" Then bombs started falling on the buildings. One of the rooftop machine guns suddenly fell silent. Auerbach yelled himself hoarse. One of the high school buildings had caught fire. Lizards skittered out of it. Auerbach drew a bead on one, fired. The Lizard sprawled on the ragged grass and lay there kicking. He hoped the girls could ride. He'd have horses for them; he'd seen a couple of his men go down. Companions were helping others along. One of his troopers was down, dead. So was Wendell Summers. It looked like one shell had got him and another his horse. Auerbach gulped. Even for war, it was ugly. The projectile struck just below the turret. The carrier burst into flames at once. Escape hatches popped open as its crew and the fighting males it bore tried to escape. Some did; fire from the Deutsch gunners cut down others. He made sure he put a tread right on it, then locked that tread and turned the landcruiser in its own length, crushing the Deutsch male as if he were grinding an insect underfoot. Then he drove on. "Hit!" Ussmak shouted as flame and smoke spurted from behind bushes. They killed two troop carriers that he saw, and managed to set one landcruiser afire. Few of the males who used the projectors escaped. The Lizards weren't the only ones screeching now; screams from the darkness and Polish cries for the Virgin said some of those sprayed bullets and shells had found targets. "Pilot says our killercraft cover just shot down three of the Big Uglies' aircraft and the rest have broken off pursuit." The male who'd been directing him out of the transport reeled away, blood pouring from two or three wounds. "He'd better hurry -- there's flame from one wing of the transport, and now from the fuselage, and--" The blast behind him drowned his words. The rear of the heavy landcruiser lifted off the gound. Another bomb landed, this one even closer. Fragments of the casing rattled off the sides of the landcruiser. A combat engineer went down, kicking; blood spurted from a wound in his side. A medical technician gave him first aid, then summoned a couple of other males to take him away for further treatment. She ran her tongue over her lips, which made him notice that she'd painted them red. "I'd do just about anything to get the chance to go along," she murmured in a breathy little voice he wasn't used to hearing anywhere outside the bedroom. "I'm sorry, but it isn't in my hands. Like I said, it's up to the colonel." "Well, I'll just have to talk with him, won't I?" She sashayed off toward the First National Bank. All at once, one of the helicopters turned into a blue-white fireball. Goldfarb whooped like a Red Indian. Teerts sometimes felt guilty about what happened to Tokyo. Millions of intelligent beings dead, and all because he'd warned of what the Nipponese Tosevites were attempting. He staggered to his feet. A meter or two behind him, the Lizard guard was down, hissing piteously. The window in the interrogator's office had blown in, skewering him with shards of shattered glass like shrapnel. His automatic rifle lay forgotten beside of him. Head still ringing, Anielewicz snatched it up. He fired a short burst into the Lizard's head, and then looked into the office where he'd been grilled. The Lizard interrogator in there was down, too, and wouldn't get up again; flying glass had flensed him. By the chance of war, Jakub Kipnis was not badly hurt. He saw Mordechai, saw the Lizard rifle, and made a ghastly attempt at a smile. "The German flying bomb--" he began. Mordechai cut him down with another short burst, then made sure of him with a shot behind the ear. It had blown up in the middle of the yard. Broken men and pieces of men lay all around. Groans and shrieks in several languages rose into the sky. Some men, those nearest the crater and those who'd been unlucky enough to stop a chunk of the fuselage, would never groan or shriek or cry again. It didn't matter; the Pole died before he could do anything. Some men went down. More scrambled into the crater the rocket had made and out the other side to freedom. The fourth was a hit. The Lizard machine gun fell silent. As he'd feared, he found both gunners down, one with the top of his head blown off, the other moaning with a shoulder wound. The Lizard APC went up in a Fourth of July display of exploding ammunition. They flailed the English with cannons and rockets. Everywhere men were down, dead or screaming. Several tanks sent greasy black pillars of smoke up into the sky. He hadn't finished the sentence when the high-explosive round burst alongside the Tosevite gun. The cannon overturned; the Big Uglies of its crew were flung aside like crumpled papers. The three-male crew bailed out. One of them managed to reach the second combat vehicle. The Big Uglies shot the other two on the ground. A moment later, the stricken combat vehicle brewed up. "Later, at lower altitude, we met more skilled Tosevite raiders. Because we had exhausted our missiles, we had to engage them with cannon fire. Pilot Vemmen in my flight did have his killercraft badly damaged, while I am told two other males in different flights were shot down." Two rifles barked, almost in the same instant. The gunshots made men who didn't know what was going on cry out; a couple of women screamed. (Friedrich.) The northern pocket had no males left in it now. Some had been evacuated. More were dead or captured. Even so, several Big Ugly males went down when the shell burst among them. Before he could say anything, Skoob's machine gun started rattling away. Hot brass cartridge cases clattered down onto the floor. "Got him!" Skoob shouted, almost as excitedly as if he'd tasted ginger himself. "Tosevite male with a rifle -- probably one of the ones who was shooting at you, superior sir." A couple of houses away, somebody started screaming for his mother in a high, broken voice. A couple of men were down, one twisting, one ominously limp and still. The Lizard let loose with another burst. Off to Mutt's right, a human voice started screaming. "Hell of a peg, Lieutenant!" he yelled. "Little bastard's raw meat now!" Cheers rang amid the shooting. The last missile streaked after the strange little tailless Deutsch aircraft and blew it out of the sky. Hatches flew open. Like popcorn jumping up in a popper, Lizards started bailing out of the stricken machine. Now Auerbach's cavalry company opened up with almost everything they had. The Lizard infantrymales fell, one after another, although a couple made it to the ground unhurt and started shooting back. The bazooka round hit. The helicopter staggered, as if it had run into an invisible wall up there in the air. Then it heeled over onto its side and crashed down on US 40. For good measure, the bazooka team put another round into its belly as it lay there. A few Lizards were still shooting, but Auerbach's surviving Americans made short work of them. Even at fifteen hundred meters, a hit from one of their monster shells would blow -- did blow -- the turret right off a Panzer IV and send it blazing into the snow. Jager clenched his fists. With luck, the commander, gunner and loader there never knew what hit them. A Tiger maybe half a kilometer off to the north of Jager took a hit just as it was about to reach the cover of pine woods. It brewed up spectacularly, with a smoke ring going out through the cupola as if the devil were enjoying a cigar, and then with the ammunition cooking off in a display of red and orange fireworks. Some of the smoke that boiled out of it came from the burning flesh of its five crewmen. The rocket hit a Panzer IV in the engine compartment, which burst into flames. Hatches popped open. Men ran for the trees. A couple of them made it. Machine-gun fire cut down the rest. Like the sun, the fireball in what had been Oels was too brilliant to look at. The light that filled the barn went from white to yellow to orange to red, slowly fading as it did so. When Jager looked up again, he saw a great fiery pillar ascending toward the heavens, coloring the clouds red as blood. (bombed the Lizards) "Very well," Atvar said, "let Munchen be destroyed, and let it be a lesson to the Deutsche and to all the Big Uglies of Tosev 3." "It shall be done," Pshing said. He had no idea how high into the night the glowing cloud mounted. Miles, that was all he could be sure of. Other thing was, the base of that cloud looked a lot farther away than he'd figured it would -- which meant that the explosion was even bigger than he had guessed. (US strike after a tactical retreat from the outskirts of Chicago) "This one is a waterside city and we have no great numbers of males nearby." "Seattle?" Atvar considered. "Yes, that is a good choice, for exactly the reasons you name. We shall bomb it. The Tosevites have begun this game -- let us see if they have the liver to play it to the end." Her breath came in short gasps, as if she'd run a long way. Nieh grunted and shuddered, but kept moving inside her until, a moment later, she also quivered in release. Then, still thoughtful, he rolled off beside her so his weight, which suddenly seemed much heavier, wouldn't flatten her. Larssen sat tight. A cry from off to Auerbach's left said he'd hit somebody. Larssen rose up, shot, flopped back down. Rachel Hines let out a short, sharp shriek. Larssen bounced to his feet. "Barbara?" he shouted. "Honey?" Auerbach fired at him. Several other shots rang out at at the same instant. Larssen reeled backwards, collapsed bonelessly. His rifle fell to the ground. He wasn't goin anywhere, not any time soon. "Clipped the last two joints right off my ring finger," she said matter-of-factly. "Don't know what I'll do about a wedding band if I ever get married." Jens Larssen was still twitching when Auerbach got to him, but he didn't see any point in calling for a corpsman. Larssen had taken one in the chest, one in the belly, and one in the side of the face. He wasn't pretty and he was dead, only his body didn't quite know it yet. As Auerbach stood over him, he let out a bubbling sigh and quit breathing. "Well, that's that," Auerbach said, bending to pick up Auerbach's Springfield -- no point in leaving a good weapon out to rust. "Now we can get on with the important stuff, like fighting the war." A great column of smoke, shot through with crimson flames, rose into the air. Moishe craned his neck to watch it climb. Slowly, softly, he said, "I don't think that was anything between us and rome, Captain. I think that was Rome." But instead of going smoothly with the target-identifying routine, Nejas made a strange, wet noise. "Superior sir!" Skoob cried, and then, in anguish, "Sniper! A sniper killed the commander!" "No," Ussmak whispered. Votal, his first landcruiser commander, had died that way. Ussmak shoved the muzzle of his personal weapon out through a firing port and sprayed the Big Ugly with bullets before he could chuck another grenade into the landcruiser. Ussmak laid a hearing diaphragm over the gunner's chest cavity. He heard nothing. Some time in the last little while, Skoob had quietly died. Ussmak raised the personal weapon he'd been holding ever since he frightened the mechanics with it. A ginger-quickened impulse made him squeeze the trigger. The burst crumpled Hisslef and flung him backwards like a sheet of wastepaper. Ussmak was amazed at how little he cared. Pshing's face appeared on the communicator screen. "Exalted Fleetlord, excuse the interruption," Atvar's adjutant said, "but, per your orders, I report the successful destruction by atomic weapon of the Deutsch city of Hamburg. All aircraft involved in the mission have returned safely to base." (95,000 more human casualties by the end of this book at the very least. 67,000 more Lizard casualties as well... Equals up to 325,000 total human casualties thus far and... 157,000 Lizard casualties. They're still winning in terms of casualties but that's simply inevitable.)